The pilot course – which is in partnership with the London College of Fashion’s Centre for Sustainable Fashion – ticks off one of the 2020 Circular Fashion Commitments that Asos pledged to achieve at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2017.

The breakthrough trial will see 15 members of Asos’s design team attend half-day workshops and discussions where they will explore concepts and practical applications of circular design with researchers from the CSF team.

The aim of the initiative is to help the fashion company eventually produce sustainable items using end-to-end design techniques.

“With this pilot we’re making sure our designers have the knowledge and skills they need to put sustainability and circularity into practice,” Vanessa Spence, design director at Asos, explained. “It’s a vital step on our journey to designing products with circularity in mind right from the start, which will ensure that they are made responsibly, remain in use for as long as possible once they’re sold, and don’t cause unnecessary waste at the end of their lives.”

Ellen MacCarthur, who launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to encourage a more sustainable future, added: “We need to paint a vision of what a circular economy can look like. In a time of creativity and innovation, why would we ever turn anything into waste?”

The news comes just weeks after the online powerhouse pledged to ban the use of cashmere, silk, feathers and mohair by the end of January 2019.